Last week we were participating at Integrated Systems Europe trade fair in Amsterdam. Our wayfinding software could be seen on Famasete Wingsys kiosks and also in ONELAN booth.
Lots of halls, people and digital screens. This was a kind of event where you really need wayfinding. Hope to see a good wayfinding mobile app next year, this would save a lot of time. There were some wayfinding kiosks but without proper guidance or even hall numbers.
Thanks for visiting us.
When we talk about wayfinding, we don’t just mean a building directory combined with a map. Modern wayfinding actually includes also calculating the shortest route and displaying it visually. The following small demo with a maze will demonstrate 3D Wayfinder’s path-finding capabilities.
[xyz-ihs snippet=”2D-Embedding-in-Blog”]
Do display a route from the user location to the destination we have to call a small bit of JavaScript code in our onclick event:
onclick="wayfinder.showPath(wayfinder.nodes[126])";
This API call will find the path from start node to the end node, where node 126 is the node that is connected with location “End”.
There are all possible routes marked with navigation nodes and connected to each other in 3D Wayfinder Editor, to enable pathfinding:
When using path-finding, application calculates automatically the shortest route from the starting node (the Kiosk location) to the required location. In mobile applications, the Kiosk node can be your position inside the building. With 3D Wayfinder, the shortest route is calculated in a 3 dimensional room. Which means the shortest path through all the floors.
In addition there is also feature to change the weight of the connections between nodes. With this we can talk about finding the optimal route. But it doesn’t have to be the shortest. For example when you would like to guide your visitors to use the path inside the building instead of going around the building. Then you can set the weight for outdoor nodes higher.
Pathfinding functionality comes bundled in an add-on you can order from 3D Wayfinder Administration panel. It is also included in the Pro plan.
Of course for smaller buildings with less complex floor-plans, you don’t have to use pathfinding functionality. You can just highlight the area or show the description from location directory. Without pathfinding you can choose the Lite service plan, which is only $9 or 7€ per month.
We have updated our CMS to upload simple 2D images as wayfinding maps. To use your existing drawings, just upload the image files under Floors page. If you have PDF-files You have to convert these into images (PNG, JPEG). We recommend to use at least more than 4096px images for situations where You need to zoom in.
We have added also a new free HTML5 template for 2D maps. Template is named Default2D, see the demo here:
https://static.3dwayfinder.com/projects/df85fafe2b5605ae7ab1f184e32a1caf/Default2D/
To add the locations and create paths for navigation, just use the Editor the same way as it works in 3D. After adding data to the maps, press “Update 2D navigation” button. This will generate the 2D data.
2D floor-plans don’t require WebGL support, so they can be used in all mobile devices and low-end kiosk PC-s. Creating wayfinding with 2D floor plans don’t require any special skills and you can always use existing images. If you like to go for 3D and you don’t have the 3D models, you can always order professional 3D floor-plans from us.
Firefox 35.0.1 (released January 26) doesn’t handle order independent transparency. Firefox has added support for the EXT_blend_minmax WebGL extension, but at the same time something with additively blending on floating point textures has stopped working.
Under Linux FF 35.0.1 everything is working fine.
We are doing some research, but probably we just need to wait for a new version of FF with this thing fixed.
So far we recommend to use Chrome or IE. Also sorted transparency works.
Famasete
We are participating at Integrated Systems Europe 2015 in Amsterdam 10.02-12.02.
This year we are showing wayfinding solution with our Portugal partner Wingsys.
Wingsys is a manufacturer of multitouch interactive tables and multimedia kiosks with really attractive design of the market.
Wingsys 42″ touchscreen kiosk TA007Q with 3D Wayfinder:
You can find us in exhibition Stand: 1-Q72